The grainy, black-and-white photographs from 1946 fluttered to the floor, free from decades of bondage among hundreds of photos in my mother's leather albums. I picked up the images and stared at my parents and strained to imagine the young couple in love.

The photo was a forever-frozen time capsule, a blip in some nameless baby's life, suspended in perpetuity in a chintzy frame. An anonymous toddler, ostensibly born around the same time as me, in a backyard kiddie pool, living a childhood that looked like mine.